CoSort Big Data Preparation Doubles Cognos Reporting Speed

MELBOURNE, Fla., May 8, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Innovative Routines International (IRI), Inc., a long-time leader in big data transformation and data-centric protection technology, is confirming a significant performance improvement method for users of IBM's Cognos® Business Intelligence (BI) software. When IRI's CoSort® is used to stage the source data first, Cognos can generate report outputs in half the time.

Premanandham ("Prem") Govindaraju, a Sr. BI architect at Unisoft Infotech in Singapore, demonstrated how CoSort prepares, or franchises, huge table and file data for Cognos in a single, off-line filtering, sorting, joining, and aggregation operation. "CoSort's single-pass transformation of the raw data happens with incredible speed in the file system, and in fact doubled the throughput of the overall BI process," Prem observed.

In Prem's benchmark, a report requiring the sorting, joining, and aggregation of two data sources (345MB and 89.2MB files) took Cognos 158 seconds to complete on an Intel® Core™ i3 CPU 380 @ 2.53GHz running Windows. When CoSort transformed the data first, however, the subsets were available to Cognos in 21 seconds. Cognos then needed another 58 seconds to present that data in the same report, but the total processing time (to produce the same report on the same data) was only 79 seconds.

According to IT Consultant Wilfred Morgan of WME Consulting in Washington, DC, using CoSort to pre-transform data for BI tools like Cognos not only speeds the creation of meaningful visualizations, but "avoids the metadata complexity, redundancy and synchronization problems of performing transformations in the BI layer." Morgan added that centralized data preparation "allows you to deal with changes to source data in one place, and to re-use the processed data in multiple reporting applications."

For more information on accelerating Cognos and other BI operations with CoSort, visit the blog's business intelligence section.

About IRI, The CoSort Company

Founded in 1978, Innovative Routines International (IRI), Inc. is an independent software vendor specializing in data processing and protection. Headquartered in Melbourne, Florida, IRI has with licensing and support offices in more than 30 cities worldwide. Its flagship CoSort package transforms and reports on big data, migrates legacy sorts, and replaces many SQL, shell, and 3GL programs. CoSort-compatible tools include FACT™(Fast Extract), FieldShield® (data masking), NextForm™ (data conversion), and RowGen™ (test data).